You’ve been walking with your head down, braced against the wind, so when you look up it’s a shock. You lean against a breaker, barely able to breathe but there it is, a washed-out rainbow of terraced cottages fronting the sea with outstretched arms.
You turn back, retrace your steps along the crescent. Maybe you’ll recognise something, a driftwood seagull, a broken scallop shell, the warm, burnt syrup smell of flapjacks fresh from the oven. A door will swing open, she will appear, her cheeks waxy, criss-crossed like baking paper lifted straight from the tin, hervoice will wrap itself around you like a plaid blanket.
‘Lexie?’ You feel all the small muscles around your skull relax as you smile and turn to confront a sturdy, dark-haired woman. But it’s not her. Too young. Wrong clothes. She is calling to her neighbour, whose name you now hear is Becky, or Betty. You look away, embarrassed. The wind, the gulls crying, they interfered with your hearing.
Becky, or Betty, goes into the woman’s house. You close your eyes, slip in after her.
The flowered wallpaper has been concealed by a few layers of paint since you were last here, the sitting room has been knocked through into the kitchen and the murky green carpet, dappled brown as if with random gravy splashes, has been replaced by scrubbed pine floorboards, making the whole place feel lighter, bigger.The old hearth seems darker than you remember, but the coal fire smells the same, soot and salt. You aregathering sea coal with the boys. Your hands are black and blistered. She sits you at the kitchen sink, washes you clean.
‘What were you thinking? Lexie’s too little.’
And now she says it is lovely to see you. She says how sorry she was to hear about your dad. She doesn’t mention your mother. The oven timer pings in the kitchen.
You sit on the sea wall. Your ‘phone pings. Text message from Jack. Sent yesterday. About to ventureinto the attic. Miss you.xx. He’s helping you clear out your dad’s old place near Ulverston. Maybe we could live here, he said. We. Us. A house. A commitment then.
You can’t decide if it would be a good thing or not. Can’t decide how to respond to his message, so you don’t.You head for the village stores to stock up on biscuits and bottled water; it has a half-decent wine selection, so you stock up on that as well.
One more turn along the crescent. It looks different, too neat, all the doors are closed now. It’s Saturday, perhaps everyone has driven into town, to the supermarket. Perhaps the cottages are all holidayrentals having their sheets changed, their cushions plumped and their bathrooms scrubbed.
Back at the site Mags, from the caravan next door, is perched on her steps smoking a cigarette, just as she was when you pulled up last night.
‘Fancy a cuppa, hen?’
You fight your instinct to refuse, wrap your hands around the mug.
‘Finding your way around, are you?’ she asks. ‘Nice to see someone using the old van again. Did she die, then, Mrs. Williamson?’
‘Still going strong. Ninety-one in June.’
‘Uh huh.’ Mags clearly expects more.
‘My boyfriend . . . she’s his nan.’
‘Steven or Jack?’
‘Jack.’
‘I like Jack. Haven’t seen him for years. Not with you then?’
‘Working.’
That’s not strictly true, he’s re-tiling the shower, sorting out the attic, but not ‘work’ working. He showed you a picture of the village on the ‘Visit Scotland’ website, and you thought it could be the one, the one you remember from way back, so you said so, and maybe you’re going to regret it, but he just handedover the keys and a set of directions. He
didn’t offer to come with you. As if he’d read your mind. He’s getting good at that, and every time he does it you feel something lock down, like a steel shutter unravelling and clanking shut at the back of your head.You think again about texting him, but there’s no signal out here.
On Sunday morning you wake up to the sound of someone hammering on the door.
It’s rain. Rain, thundering on the tin roof and for a second you think you’re back at the beach hut. You feelsick and you wish you hadn’t drunk so much red wine last night. But you’re wrapped in a sleeping bag in Jack’s nan’s caravan. It’s safe.
Not like that weekend. A Friday night, wet, like today, windy, waves thrashing the sand. He drove away. Took your mother away. But where were you? You don’t remember. He wouldn’t have left you alone in an old wooden shack by a deserted beach. You came here, didn’t you? To a terraced cottage looking out to sea. But it wasn’t, it can’t have been, you can’t make the geography fit. You scrape away at your memory untilit hurts, until your insides fill with broken glass, like when you had your appendix out, ten years old, fretting alone in a hospital bed. Nothing. Nothing fits.
The kettle boils and the van fills with steam. You use the sleeve of your
t-shirt to wipe the condensation from the mirror above the draining board, clear a patch in the window nextto it. A sea mist has rolled in, isolating the caravans like container ships at low tide. There is a crumpled photograph slotted into the frame of the mirror. A large, ferocious-looking woman in a print dress, two skinny teenaged boys. Mags brought it over last night.
‘Thought this might make you smile,’ she said, ‘not sure when it was taken, but we’ve been coming here thirty years or more.’
And it does make you smile. You’ve seen other photographs, Jack has a formidable archive, but there is something about this one that knocks the breath out of you. The way the brothers are posed, drapedaround their grandmother’s neck, grinning, taking the piss like boys do, but so clearly fond, so clearly able to wrap her around their little fingers.
This will not do. A woman, two boys, but it’s not them. You know it’s not them. The chronology is wrong, the setting is wrong. But that does not stem the wash of grief. It makes no sense. You tried quizzing Mags about another woman with two boys in the village, a small girl who stayed with them, but she couldn’t help.
You once asked your own grandmother. ‘Where did I stay? When Mother was ill and Dad was away on business, where was I?
‘Do you not remember, sweetheart?’ She didn’t look you in the eye. ‘You stayed with us. Granddad would pick you up from school and you stayed with us.’ She smiled then, ‘you never wanted to go home! You’d bawl and fight all the way back in the car.’
But you don’t remember, not any of it. Not before, not after.
Your father’s face was white, unshaven, lacking definition, his shirt was hanging out.
You’d never seen him like that.
‘Trust your mother to make a mess, eh Alex?’
Grandma said: ‘that’s enough now, Alistair. Not in front of the child.’
And then you moved, hundreds of miles away, work, he said. He thought just moving on was enoughto wipe it all clean. That not talking about something could make it not have happened. Your grandparents virtually disappeared from your life and you never understood why. They are dead now so you can’t ask.
The coffee has gone cold. You need to wash your hands. The whole caravan needs a scrub. The curtains above the sink are brittle from lack of care, their tiny blue flowers fogged over by layers of grease and dirt. It is chilly. Your skin begins to crawl. You struggle into the old waterproof Jack lent you, you needto talk to him, tell him you’re going to drive back this afternoon. You walk out into the weather clutching your ‘phone, head for the shore searching for a signal.
The air is warmer outside, heavy with moisture, it hangs around you like a damp sheet. You walk, faster and faster, break into a run, trying to outrun the mist, skid awkwardly as your feet hit the stones, wish you had taken the time to put some proper
shoes on. And you stop, out of breath, out of space. The tide is in, the sky is quite clear over the sea. A curious reversal of the weather system has trapped you on a narrow strip of shingle between the fog and the relentless shallow waves sighing like lonely old women around your feet. You can’t see the trees, you feel a panic attackcoming on, stones pressing on your chest. So, you do what you always do when you don’t understand, you try to go back. Go back to that warm room with the green and brown carpet, the rough and tumble and gravy dinners, the big, soft, white towels, the teasing and sleeping and being safe. It is there, somewhere, justbeyond you and you wonder if you walked out into the grey water, if you walked out far enough, you would find it. Your ‘phone rings, the moment passes.
‘Alex! I’ve been trying to get you.’ ‘There’s no signal atthe caravan site.’ ‘Of course! Where are you?’
So you tell him. And Jack says it happens quite often, that strange weather thing when the mistsuddenly vanishes by the edge of the sea. He says he found an old biscuit tin in the attic, broken scallop shell and a school exercise book. ‘I think it’s your handwriting,’ he says. ‘Looks like lots of stories. I haven’t readthem.’ He’ll send you a photo. You want to say don’t do that, it’s just an old tin, but you can’t get the words out before the signal starts to break up.
It doesn’t take long to pack. You bundle everything into the car, leave a bottle of wine and a note on the steps of Mags’s caravan, pull away across the wet grass.
You don’t stop until the service station on the Southbound M6, near Carlisle. Tea in a polystyrene cup, spectral travellers, puffy eyed, slightly grubby, insubstantial. You pull out your phone, two messages, both from Jack. The first is just a photograph. You spread your fingers across the screen, zoom in on the image. Why did he send it to you?
The colours have faded but the tartan ribbon across the top left corner is still in place. Old fashionedwatercolour on the lid. Blue sky, tumbling clouds, gulls wheeling on the up-draught above a crescent ofrainbow-washed fishermen’s cottages. Wide windows
with painted sills. Two boys throw sticks for a dog on a pebble beach, a woman watches from a doorway.
Your fingers go into spasm, crunching the polystyrene cup, spilling tea into the empty cartons and sweet wrappers on the floor. This is Jack saying I know, I know all about you. You’ve got that dragging sensation in your guts, stories being raked over like gravel in the undertow, scouring your insides, emptying you out. The steel shutters are rattling down. You’re too much of a liability. He wants out. You need to think,but not now, you have a journey to finish. You open the second text: I’m not going anywhere safe home Jx.
In the cafeteria, under the neon lights, life goes on. Travellers. In transit. You could stay here, among the ghosts and the plastic chairs. You could. You could delete Jack’s messages. Back at the car you don’t bother to look at the map. You’re on a motorway, you can’t just turn back. You pull out into the traffic and drive on, heading south.
Author: Chrissy lives in County Durham in the wilds of the North Pennines where she is inspired by the changeable weather, the landscape and journeys.